Capitalist Formations of Enclosure: Space and the Extinction of the Commons

Despite their theoretical and political potential, recent debates on enclosure usually lack an effective consideration of how space is mobilized in the process of dispossession. This article connects the analysis of enclosure's general spatial rationality to a range of illustrations of its particular formations and procedures. Enclosure is understood as one of capitalism's “universal territorial equivalents”, a polymorphous technique with variegated expressions in time but also with a consistent logic that uses the spatial erosion of the commons to subsume non‐commodified, self‐managed social spaces. In response to the ever‐changing nature of commoning, successive regimes of enclosure reshape the morphologies of deprivation and their articulation to other state and market apparatuses in order to meet shifting strategies of capital accumulation and social reproduction. Through a spatially nuanced account of these phenomena, I outline a tentative genealogy of enclosure formations that allows tracking diverse geographies of dispossession across different scales and regulatory contexts in various historical stages of capitalist development.     

Agricultural dispossessions during the 1964–1985 Brazilian dictatorship

The objective of this study is to analyze dispossession processes in rural Brazil that took place during the dictatorship that ruled the country from 1964 to 1985, when Brazilian capitalist agriculture had its most significant impulse. From a theoretical perspective, dispossessions that served capital expansion can be distinguished from those that did not. The first group includes processes that led to proletarianization of immediate producers who had been peasants, or to the capitalization of lands that they had been using for subsistence. Among processes that did not expand capital are those that involved the simple redistribution of the means of production—including land—or surpluses. State violence was one of the mechanisms used to execute many of these processes, which supported the expansion project of the dictatorial regime, particularly in northern Brazil. By converting means of subsistence—land—into capital, or immediate producers—peasants—into proletarians, these processes reproduced in contemporary formats what Marx had called primitive accumulation and that in late capitalism I call expanding dispossession.     

Unpacking “Accumulation By Dispossession”, “Fictitious Commodification”, and “Fictitious Capital Formation”: Tracing the Dynamics of Bahrain's Land Reclamation

We explore the interrelationships between the concepts of fictitious commodities, fictitious capital and accumulation by dispossession. We do so through a detailed examination of the dynamics of land reclamation in the Kingdom of Bahrain during the years 2001–2014. Particularly, we dissect in‐depth the ensemble of social relations and chain of events involved in two specific real estate projects, Norana and Bahrain Financial Harbour, that have come to symbolize Bahrain's neoliberal era. Reclamation was a unique process in which land was explicitly produced as a commodity for market purposes. Primary material of land deeds, company registration documents, and news articles were used to map out the social relations across the state–finance–real estate nexus. We emphasize that our understanding of accumulation by dispossession involving land is greatly enhanced if we view it as a process of reconfiguring the ensemble of social relations using fictitious commodification and fictitious capital formation.     

Classifying Like a State: Land Dispossession on Eastern Crete’s Contested Mountains

Despite the widespread attention to capital investments in land and property around the globe, the active re-regulating role of the neoliberal state in processes of “accumulation by dispossession” remains underexplored. Through an in-depth look at the dispossession of highly fragmented and loosely regulated private land for windfarm investments on Crete’s eastern corner, Sitia, this paper re-affirms the political nature of the forcible appropriation of land for large-scale investments; dissects the specific mechanisms in which the state dispossesses land on behalf of investors and promotes the forcible appropriation of land from below; and problematises the dialectic relationship of both rupture and continuity between crisis and inherited, path-dependent relations embedded in land. The transformation of Sitia’s loosely regulated, informal relations on land is made possible through the mobilisation of the state’s bureaucratic and normalising powers, which redefine the concept of forest and dispossess through classifying land as such.     

The Political Ecology of Palk Bay Fisheries: Geographies of Capital,Fisher Conflict,Ethnicity and Nation‐State

Indian trawl fishers in the Palk Bay regularly engage in cross‐border fishing to the detriment of Sri Lankan artisanal fishers whose nets are irreparably damaged. Increasing tension between Indian trawl fishers from the state of Tamil Nadu and Sri Lankan artisanal fishers from the Northern Province has resulted in the Sri Lankan government patrolling the international maritime boundary line (IMBL) more stringently and increased arrests of Indian trawl fishers. This paper argues that the present “fisheries crisis” in the Palk Bay must be understood from a political ecology perspective that takes cognizance of the circuitous nature of capital accumulation and how fisher conflict, ethnicity and the politics of the nation‐state have shaped the spatial practices of accumulation. In a changing global context where semi‐industrial vessels are increasingly crossing boundaries, it argues for more context specific studies of processes of capital accumulation.     

Between Water Abundance and Scarcity: Discourses,Biofuels, and Power in Piura,Peru

In 2006, transnational ethanol corporations arrived in Chira, a semi‐arid zone located in the Piura region of northern Peru. Large expanses of land were used to produce sugarcane for ethanol, which triggered local concern over the pressure this would mean on the regional water balance. From political ecology, I examine how the state and a corporation produced discourses on the idea of water abundance in the Chira Basin in order to secure water rights, which increased the risk of water scarcity for small communities, pastoralists and farmers in the region. In doing so, I call attention to the discursive strategies aimed to facilitate processes of dispossession under a technical ethos that reinforce capital accumulation. Finally, I argue that water abundance discourses contributed to produce a “waterscape” that not only produced unsustainable water use but also reinforced social inequalities.     

Dispossession by Accumulation? Mining,Water and the Nature of Enclosure on the Bolivian Altiplano

Abstract: This paper examines processes of primitive accumulation and livelihood dispossession on the Bolivian Altiplano. Through empirical examination of the social and environmental effects of mining waste, the paper demonstrates that indigenous campesino community members are experiencing livelihood dispossession by way of three interrelated forms of accumulation: accumulation of toxic sediments on agricultural fields; accumulation of water and water rights by mining firms; and accumulation of territory by mining operations. In the case under examination, full proletarianization is not taking place, and processes of dispossession are not a “fix” for an overaccumulation crisis. The paper argues for greater attention to the contingent role of nature's materiality in processes of dispossession and accumulation.     

Accumulation by dispossession and hazardscape production in post-corporate gold mining in Itogon,Philippines

This study investigates the experience of a gold mining community two decades after corporate mining activities ceased and were replaced by informal subcontract small-scale mining in Itogon, Philippines. Drawing on David Harvey’s accumulation by dispossession and Daanish Mustafa’s hazardscape, we consider the lasting effects, from 1903, of dispossession upon the establishment of the first commercial mines in the Philippines as experienced by traditional miners in Itogon. Despite the closure of mining operations, mineral lands remain privately owned, resulting in the persistence of legal land dispossession among local small-scale gold miners. Mining activities still continue as small-scale miners are able to access abandoned mines through subcontract mining. Subcontract mining has changed the source of capital that funds mining activities from mining corporation to rent-seeking small-scale mining financiers, but the new economic relations still benefit from the capitalist logic of low natural resources and labour value. We argue that the production of hazardscapes is a consequence of accumulation by dispossession through (1) processes of expropriation of mineral lands and the consequent creation of free labour among local miners; (2) the externalisation environmental cost as an accumulation strategy that results in the production of socionatural hazards; and (3) exploitation of those who labour and who are made to work in precarious work environment while contributing to the production of hazardscapes.     

Urbanisation and Financialisation in the Context of a Rescaling State: The Case of Spain

The secondary circuit is a central element in the processes of capital accumulation, and its relevance has become more acute in recent years as urban planning, housing, and real estate have become privileged arenas of the territoriality “variegated” processes of neoliberalisation. This paper explores three theoretical concepts, all closely associated with neoliberalisation: the rescaling of the state, urban entrepreneurialism and financialisation. The paper uses these three theoretical concepts to explain, on the one hand, the increasing relevance of housing and real estate and, on the other hand, their connection with two of the major manifestations of the current financial crisis: excessive private indebtedness and the credit crunch. Analysing the Spanish case is particularly revealing because of the intensity of construction work until 2007, the severity of the subsequent economic crisis, and the wide range of agents involved in the growth of a neoliberalised and financialised secondary circuit of capital in Spain.     

The Redevelopmental State: Governing Surplus Life and Land in the ‘Urban Age’

This article theorizes changing configurations of development governance emerging as states attempt to reconcile two contradictory pressures of global urbanization: dispossessing capitalist accumulation and demands for inclusive welfare. It introduces the ‘redevelopmental state’ as a dynamic spatio‐political framework for understanding how hegemonic rule is tenuously forged amid potentially volatile urban land struggles. Whereas Northern urban redevelopment theories are less attentive to post‐colonial urbanization processes and most developmental state scholarship has not focused on cities, the redevelopmental state offers an alternative conceptualization. It centres on how emerging regimes of territorial rule, development and political participation contour access to land and social benefits in Southern cities. Forged at key conjunctures of social pressure, these redevelopmental state spaces work through and beyond formal policies and institutions, and articulate with nationalist cultural politics of belonging and aspiration that foster consent for redevelopment while also legitimating exclusions, violence and dispossession. A case study of Mumbai illustrates redevelopmental state spaces that suture ethno‐religious nationalism, urbanized accumulation and populist welfare to unevenly distribute life capacities, garnering both cooperation and contestation. The article concludes by suggesting ways this spatially attuned framing can provide insights into the recent rise of ethno‐nationalism and authoritarian populism around the world.     

“Much in Blood and Money”: Necropolitical Ecology on the Margins of the Uganda Protectorate

Increasingly, political ecologists invoke the concept of “green grabbing” to refer to the ways in which processes of accumulation by dispossession articulate with various imperatives for environmental protection. This paper traces these contemporary processes to their roots in the colonial era, focusing on how dispossession in the name of environmental protection intersects with complex historical geographies of state formation and internal territorialisation. Drawing upon the case of Mount Elgon in Britain's Uganda Protectorate, in particular, we reconstruct the ways in which the interrelated “birth” of both conservation and transcontinental agrarian markets were intimately connected to the emergence and normalisation of the colonial state itself. In doing so, we propose the term necropolitical ecology as a framework to encompass the ways in which contemporary “green grabs” partially emerge from racialised modes of colonial appropriation, the violence of which often still lingers in agencies and institutions of environmental governance in the contemporary postcolony.     

EXEMPLIFYING ACCUMULATION BY DISPOSSESSION: MINING AND INDIGENOUS PEOPLES IN THE PHILIPPINES

Using a case study from the Philippines, this article applies David Harvey's theory of accumulation by dispossession to show how neoliberal policies enable mining corporations to locate, lay claim to, and develop mineral resources in formerly inaccessible areas, which for centuries have provided safe haven for indigenous peoples and their cultures. It explains why these factors are leading to an increase in armed conflict between military forces and guerrilla groups, which recruit their members from displaced indigenous people. The article concludes that the theory of accumulation by dispossession offers an appropriate analytical tool for understanding these processes.     

Melting the Cold War Permafrost: Restructuring Military Industry in Scotland

Military industry stands at the confluence of local, national and global processes. This paper examines the restructuring of this peculiar industry in one region, Scotland, from a perspective that takes the geography of production to be a joint, though contradictory, creation. Following the work of Lovering for the UK as a whole, the case of Scotland—often imagined as "militantly proletarian"—allows a specific study of the accumulation strategies of state and capital and the role of organized labor in mediating the spatial fix. Until the early 1990s accumulation was premised on additive "capital widening" strategies. Since then, both "capital narrowing" rationalization strategies and "capital deepening" intensification strategies have been pursued. Through restructuring, the UK military industry attempts to utilize the abstract spaces of the social economy to expediently and opportunistically reconstitute the concrete spaces of production and renegotiate its dependency on the refractory material of proximate living labor. Yet spatial shifts have not uniformly benefited the southern core of the UK military industry. One reason for thecontinuing salience of military industry in Scotland has been the role of a pan-class alliance, "the Scottish lobby," in campaigning against closures and for the allocation of defense contracts. Trade unions have attempted to mediate the contradictions of restructuring by supporting external strategies to retain firm survival in their present localities, even as internally workforce numbers are cut in half and management regimes become more abrasive.     

Taming Foreign Exchange Derivatives Markets? Speculative Finance and Class Relations in Brazil

This article provides a critical interrogation of the Brazilian tax on foreign exchange derivatives deployed between 2011 and 2013. It analyses the drivers of the policy‐making process that led to implementation of the measure, locates it within the broader policy response regarding the management of cross‐border capital flows and speculative finance, and assesses its political economy significance in light of class dynamics. The author makes three arguments. First, this innovative policy tool must be interpreted in terms of the emergence of a specific form of state power allowing for the continuation of finance‐led strategies of accumulation, while mitigating some of their worst consequences. Second, this form of state power internalizes the subordinate positionality of Brazil in the global financial and monetary system. Third, while financialization processes have eroded the efficiency of a number of policy tools, this policy experiment demonstrates the possibility of regulating complex financial markets, provided that appropriate resources are dedicated to the task, and that there is the political will to do so. The article concludes by discussing theoretical implications, for how to theorize state and financialization, as well as political implications.     

“Keep withstanding”: Territory in the body,home and market in Xinjiang,China

Geographic literature has explored how territorialization occurs by multiple actors in material and symbolic spaces, especially in the home and body. Building on the important research in feminist geography concerning the body as territory, important questions remain: How do Uyghurs in China respond to state territory in their everyday lives? How does fear, pleasure, and mistrust constitute the social relations of territory? How do people experience and navigate state dispossession of territory? I use long-term ethnographic fieldwork to study these questions. China is a strong, authoritarian state with a monopoly on power and seemingly unlimited surveillance and policing capabilities. Uyghurs explored survival strategies that constituted social relations of territory as a node in overlapping networks in Xinjiang. My main argument is that despite a strong government presence, embodied Indigenous practices enabled survivance for the Uyghur people. People escaped the stress of government surveillance and policing by turning to material and symbolic modes of constituting embodied territory.     

Mining (Dis)amenity: The Political Ecology of Mining Opposition in the Kaz (Ida) Mountain Region of Western Turkey

Opposition to mining activities is an increasingly global phenomenon. A key feature of political ecology literature examining this opposition is its focus on the power of multinational corporations to gain access to resources on lands principally claimed by indigenous peoples and peasants in ‘Third World’ countries. These struggles often play out within the context of tensions between neoliberal natural resource policies and interventions by non‐governmental and civil society actors. Meanwhile, political ecology scholars of natural resource conflicts in ‘First World’ countries are documenting conflicts over environmental management that emerge from complex commodification processes and competing forms of capital investment, such as those associated with amenity migration, that privilege different characteristics of landscapes. These perspectives are rarely combined into a single framework, despite the recognition that common dimensions may intermingle in regional contexts around the world. Using the case of conflict over gold mining in the Kaz (Ida) Mountains of western Turkey, this article explores the intersection of state neoliberalism with competing forms of rural capital, which produce a regional mining conflict. Our case highlights the value of ‘locating the First and Third Worlds within’ when it comes to studies of social processes that shape environmental conflicts.     

Potemkin Revolution: Utopian Jungle Cities of 21st Century Socialism

This paper explores the entanglement of ideology and materiality in the production of the spaces of 21^st century socialism. “Millennium Cities” are currently being constructed for indigenous communities throughout the Ecuadorian Amazon, with revenues derived from petroleum extracted within their territories. As iconic spatial symbols of the “Citizens’ Revolution”, the Millennium Cities would appear to embody “the original accumulation of 21^st century socialism”—a utopian state ideology promising the collective appropriation of natural resources without the dispossession of the peasantry. Drawing on extensive field research, we argue that they are better understood as a simulation of urban modernity that is symptomatic of the predominance of ground rent in South American capitalism, and which conceals the violent repression of an autonomous indigenous project of petroleum‐based modernization. The original accumulation of 21^st century socialism can therefore be interpreted as a “fantasy of origins”, which functions to reproduce the primitive accumulation of capital.     

Conceptualising European Privatisation Processes After the Great Recession

A wave of privatisation is unfolding in Europe in the wake of the financial crisis, but it has yet to receive serious scholarly attention. This paper examines the case of Ireland, where an austerity strategy and European Union International Monetary Fund bailout conditionality have given impetus to the transfer of public assets to the private sector. Theoretically, the paper explains the roots of the phenomenon with reference to a reformulated concept of “accumulation by dispossession” whose usefulness lies in emphasising the politico‐economic drivers of privatisation, which have been neglected in the mainstream literature. A typology is presented that argues that accumulation by dispossession manifests itself, in practice, through four main processes: (1) private repossession of assets nationalised during the financial crisis; (2) restructuring of state‐owned enterprises; (3) commodification of assets and services hitherto located outside the market; and (4) privatised stimulus through public–private partnerships. The paper's framework should be useful to conceptualise ongoing privatisation processes in other European countries.     

Unravelling the “Thin Blue Line”: Policing as an Engine of Inequality

This paper argues that policing be understood as a creative social force that reproduces important dimensions of earlier iterations of the colour line. The paper advances this argument by integrating findings from two distinct research projects: the first on the household financial losses that follow arrest by immigration officials in Tucson, AZ; and the second focusing on the everyday costs of policing and carceral supervision absorbed by residents of Philadelphia, PA. Together, data from these sites illuminate how exposure to policing exhausts emotional and material resources from expansive family and community networks of care and support. To theorise the connection between financial dispossession and the dispossession of future opportunity, we draw on a heuristic reading of the “thin blue line” symbol. We conclude by suggesting a need for closer attention to how contemporary state interventions drive patterns of dispossession and vulnerability that accumulate across various scales, sites, rhythms, and collectivities.     

The Urban Village,Agrarian Transformation,and Rentier Capitalism in Gurgaon,India

Gurgaon, India's “millennium city”, is today synonymous with India's embrace of global real estate capital and private sector‐led urban development. This paper asserts that Gurgaon's spectacular urbanisation has been fundamentally underpinned by an uneven process of land acquisition, exemption and agrarian transformation. Shifting away from dispossession‐centred analyses of contemporary urbanisation in India, this paper explores Gurgaon's “urban villages” to consider the uneven integration of agrarian classes into emerging urban real estate markets. Through an examination of differential experiences of land acquisition and agrarian social change among Gurgaon's landowning classes, the paper seeks to trace complex and nonlinear processes of agrarian transformation which make possible landscapes of global accumulation.